Tyson Anthony Roberts, the artist behind the paintings above, seems like someone I’d like. He studied art and biology at UC Davis, 30 minutes from where I used to live, we were born the same year, and he now works in Seattle where I’ll be visiting at the end of the month. Not to mention the fact that his abstract paintings remind me of the background elements of a Super Mario video game. If he was anything like me he grew up with Nintendo and then Super Nintendo after that, and those games seep into your young subconscious. In his own words:

As I visualize the world around me morphing into fragments of digitized color, the abstract harmony of our environment simultaneously resists. Our ecosystems change, our environments change and we change. I believe my job as a painter is to capture this change as it is occurring. In my work, elements of abstract layering, color theory and spontaneity are merged to form rural and urban scenes that appear to be in constant transition, taking the viewer from what was to what may be. It is through this idea of continual movement that my paintings suggest the places we know are always changing, whether we are ready for them to or not…